[Buddha-l] Hindu Fundamentalism

[StormyTet at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/6/2005 4:08:38 P.M. Central Daylight Time,  
Richard.P.Hayes at comcast.net writes:

It would  be a shame if
students were no longer trained to answer the outrageously  purblind
claims made by the religiously intolerant. So I agree that we MUST  teach
religion in the public schools. What we must not do is to let  education
be replaced by sectarian  indoctrination.



ST: I just finished reading Ken Wilber's "The Marriage of Sense and Soul.'  
In his insistence that the core of spirituality (looking within) leads to what  
he calls 'vision-logic' or transrational knowledge, he insists that Science  
needs to recognize that through meditation and the community of meditaters,  
there is a way to meet the basic criteria of science in terms of validity  and 
method in acknowledging higher states of being (and he does mean  higher than 
reason). He believes that this meaning science (meditation)  desperately needs 
to be validated (on its own terms) in our day and age.  His basic answer is 
that religions of all stripes bracket their mythological  beliefs and recognize 
that they are unscientific, but to say that their practice  meditation (or 
equivalent) is a tool and that if you want to see the  results use the tool and 
verify or deny the validity.  He traces the  problems with the rift between 
science and religion to Popper and Kuhn. Kuhn  calling for an injunction (if you 
want to know this, do this) and seeing it  only in terms of materiality and 
Popper suggesting that only material objects  could be falsified (ignoring math 
and meditation experiences). 
 
I think that Wilber would call for a type of practice of meditation in  
schools as a valid tool toward understanding. He suggests that truly 'spiritual'  
people need to stand up to dogmatic myth believers and tell them that they need 
 to get to the core of what it is all about and stand up for that --  which 
for wilber comes down to the validity of meditation that is to some degree  
universal in all the world religions. Wilber considers the materialistic science  
that we are fed in school, scientism -- in otherwords, as sectarian and full 
of  myths as any fundamentalist religion in its insistence in that science has 
the  corner on truth. 
 
Stormy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/private/buddha-l/attachments/20050806/8d64b62f/attachment.htm